Twin Cities: An anthology of twin cinema from Singapore and Hong Kongedited by Joshua Ip and Tammy Ho Lai-Mingpublished by Landmark Books

"Perhaps Hong Kong is a city of cinema. From the neo-noir neon stylings of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, to the stylised longing of early Wong Kar Wai, through the boom years of Cinema City and larger-than-life film stars, she has played host to countless cinematic moments with her cosmopolitan beauty.

And perhaps Singapore is a city of form. Structure drives everything in this rigidly planned city-state—traffic lights and electronic road pricing and meters and out-of-bounds markers; a system that runs like clockwork; and a citizenry nominally cultured in conformity. The city contains multitudes from every race and creed, yet in our lives we strictly colour inside the box, queue wordlessly around the block and stand behind the yellow line.

Combine the two, and what do you get?—The twin cinema.

The twin cinemais a rigid, yet spectacular poetic form that mixes constraint with possibility. Its twin columns can be read vertically down as discrete poems, yet you can also hop across the space between skyscrapers and find meaning that bridges the gap horizontally for each line. It can be used to contrast two opposed points of view, or find a common bridge across a seemingly insurmountable gap—juxtaposition, after all, is at the heart of modern cinema. It was coined by the Singaporean poet Yeow Kai Chai.

In this project edited by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming (founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal) and Joshua Ip (founder of Sing Lit Station), poets from the twin cities, Singapore and Hong Kong, will tackle the challenge of the twin cinema form in tandem with their own interpretation of the ties that bind or divide the two. We share some links of cultural heritage, postcolonial history, rich financial centres and trading ports with the hectic life that follows, and also the sense of a hinterland yawning just across the water. Yet we also rival each other in numerous fields, and are divided by language, by geography, and political affiliation and situation. This is fertile ground for poetry—and may it grow cities."